44 Percent of Young Americans Deleted Facebook From Their Phone

Nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past 12 months, per new numbers from Pew.
Photo: Johannes Berg/Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Per new numbers out from Pew, if you’re between the ages of 18 and 29, there’s a very decent shot that you deleted the Facebook app from your phone recently. New survey numbers, done in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, show that all Americans across the board have become more leery of the social-media platform, but that hairy eye gets hairier the younger you get. While nearly two-thirds of Americans between the age of 18 and 49 changed their privacy settings within the past 12 months, only 33 percent of Americans older than 65 did.

Source: Pew Media

But it’s those mobile-app numbers that likely are causing some concern in Menlo Park: Overall, about one in four Americans say they deleted the app from their phone, and Americans across every age range seemed to be taking breaks from the world’s most popular social-media service; though, again, younger Americans were more likely to have stopped checking the service for several weeks or more within the last 12 months.

Facebook’s move to open up its data was more popular than you might expect as well. Nearly one in ten users downloaded all of their personal data, and of those, 44 percent ended up changing their privacy settings. This may or may not have been due to what they found when they started digging into what data exactly Facebook was storing about them — including every video they ever considered uploading to the service, even if they later deleted it.

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).